Abdul Fares share five of the most useful marketing approaches to enrich your own strategic plans and increase your robustness to changing external competition.

1. Proximity Marketing & Beacons

The technology for proximity marketing is nothing new, in fact, it has been available since 2013.

What has changed though is the readiness of technology such as Google Beacons for effective marketing use and practical application within more common marketing approaches.

What Are Proximity Beacons?

Beacons are a form of technology that can transmit signals over a certain (generally small) radius.

According to Abdul Fares, that devices such as mobile phones and GPS can receive marketing messages tied to their geo-location and be pinpoint targeted with relevant messaging.

How Can They Be Used for Marketing?

Proximity marketing and Beacons specifically are being widely used for everything from table service within restaurants through to sending SMS messages with discounts to existing customers when they pass by a store.

Based on a recent article from a colleague of mine “Google Beacons: Is proximity marketing ready to take off in 2020?” the main benefits for marketing include:

· Location targeting of people/potential new and repeat business.

· Mapping of marketing success and closing the online/offline marketing attribution.

· In-store messaging and promotional offers for hyper-local messaging.

· Guiding people through entire shopping centers, stadiums, airports, and cities.

· Gamification.

· Cross-selling during the buying process (for example in-store related product offers).

· Loyalty.

· Much more.

2. Conversational Commerce & Chatbots

Conversational commerce is a bigger opportunity than simply chatbots alone says Abdul Fares.

However, for the purposes of this post, chatbots are the suggested technology-based action to explore for diversifying and strengthening your strategic plans for 2020.

When Facebook acquired WhatsApp back in 2014, no small part of the strategic thinking was based on the fact that people spend more time in messaging apps than they do on social media.

Chatbots can integrate your business within external platforms (such as Facebook) allowing you to reach your audience on the messaging apps they prefer.